Walter Benjamin's Archive: Images, Texts, Signs

297 Pages·2015·18.34 MB·English

by  Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin’s Archive
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital.
Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it
has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He
collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things
out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse
which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of
the goddess of Industry.” This description is one extended metaphor for the
poetic method, as Baudelaire practised it. Ragpicker and poet: both are
concerned with refuse.
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s Archive
IMAGES, TEXTS, SIGNS
Translated by Esther Leslie
Edited by
Ursula Marx
Gudrun Schwarz
Michael Schwarz
Erdmut Wizisla
The Walter Benjamin Archive
is an Institute of the Hamburg Foundation
for the promotion of knowledge and culture
based in the Academy of Arts Berlin.
First published in paperback by Verso 2015
First published in English by Verso 2007
Translation © Esther Leslie 2007, 2015
First published as Walter Benjamins Archive: Bilder, Texte und Zeichen by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am
Main, 2006 © Suhrkamp Verlag 2006; “Expose of Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “Draft of
the Arcades of Paris,” “Fragments of the General Layout, Layout for the Expose of Paris, The Capital of the
Nineteenth Century,” and “Notes and Materials for the Arcades Project,” all reprinted by permission of the
publisher from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, pp.
3, 349–50, 873–76, 915–16, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1999 by
the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Originally published as Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf
Tiedeman © 1982 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Language and Logic” and “Language and Logic II,” trans.
Rodney Livingstone, reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
Vol. 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, pp. 272–73, Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College;
“Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism,” trans. Howard Eiland, “Spain, 1932,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, and
“Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, reprinted by permission of
the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and
others, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, pp. 3–5, 638–39, 514–15, Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College; “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter
Benjamin, English translation © 1978 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of the Publisher.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author, editors and translators have been asserted
Photos
Gisèle Freund © Estate Gisèle Freund, Paris Germaine Krull © Museum Folkwang, Essen Sasha Stone ©
Serge Stone, Blaricum
Photos supplied courtesy of Friedrich Forssman 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-204-7 (UK)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-205-4 (US)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is
available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Gill Sans Light by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Colour
CONTENTS
Preface
1 Tree of Conscientiousness Benjamin as Archivist
2 Scrappy Paperwork Collecting and Dispersal
3 From Small to Smallest Details Micrographies
4 Physiognomy of the Thingworld Russian Toys
5 Opinions et Pensées His Son’s Words and Turns of Phrase
6 Daintiest Quarters Notebooks
7 Travel Scenes Picture Postcards
8 A Bow Being Bent Composing, Building, Weaving
9 Constellations Graphic Forms
10 Rag Picking The Arcades Project
11 Past Turned Space Arcades and Interiors
12 Hard Nuts to Crack Riddles, Brainteasers, Word Games
13 Sibyls Mosaics in Siena
Bibliography and Abbreviations
About the book
Excavation and Memory
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for
exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is
experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He
who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man
digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same
matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For
the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought
secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those
images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober
rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly
useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious
probing of the spade in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an
inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in
today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his
richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that
the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where
he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine
memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the
same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from
which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first
had to be broken through. SW 2:2*, p. 576
* Abbreviated sources to be found in bibliography.

Preface
But when shall we actually write books like catalogues?
One-Way Street (SW1, p. 457)
His last archive remains a secret: the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried over
the Pyrenees in September 1940 is lost. Only one document that was transported
in it survives—an authenticated letter from May 8, 1940, in which Max
Horkheimer confirms Benjamin’s membership of the Institute for Social
Research in New York and confirms that his researches have proven to be
extremely helpful for the Institute. Lisa Fittko, who helped him and other
refugees in their escape, attested that Benjamin wanted the briefcase to be saved
above everything else; for supposedly his latest manuscript was inside, and it
was the most important thing of all, more important even than his own life. It
may possibly have contained the theses On The Concept of History. Any more
detailed information is lacking. What is certain, however, is that the briefcase
held some sort of texts by Benjamin. Papers with unknown contents are
mentioned in a police report listing the belongings on his person at the time of
his death—his last possessions consisted of a watch, a pipe, six photographs,
glasses, letters, magazines, and money, which was used to pay off the hotel bill
and the costs of the funeral.
If Benjamin had not taken precautions his legacy would have suffered the
same fate as the briefcase. It is impossible to imagine the effect that might have
had on the reception of his work. The fact that his archive is so bristling with
contents today—a fact that is barely comprehensible when viewed against the
backdrop of his personal fate—is due to the strategic calculation with which he
deposited his manuscripts, notebooks, and printed papers in the custody of
friends and acquaintances in various countries. His archives landed in the hands
of others, so that their documents might be delivered to posterity. Those who
received his work accepted the obligatory nature of their role and faithfully
conserved the papers. With the ethos of an archivist Benjamin secured the
continued life of his thought, a thought that sought to grasp the present through
reading testimonials from the past.
Benjamin’s concept of the archive, however, differs from that of the
institutionalized archives, whose self-understanding is derived from the origin of
the word “archive.” “Archive” stems from the Greek and Latin words for “town
hall, ruling office,” which, in turn, are derived from “beginning, origin, rule.”
Order, efficiency, completeness, and objectivity are the principles of archival
work. In contrast to this, Benjamin’s archives reveal the passions of the
collector. The remains heaped up in them are reserve funds or something like
iron reserves, crucial to life, and which for that reason must be conserved. These
are points at which topicality flashes up, places that preserve the idiosyncratic
registrations of an author, subjective, full of gaps, unofficial.
Thirteen of Benjamin’s archives are presented in what follows. Not all of
their contents can be enclosed within briefcases, folders, card indexes or other
containers. Something else is transferred alongside their objective significance:
Benjamin’s archives consist of images, texts, signs, things that one can see and
touch, but they are also a reservoir of experiences, ideas, and hopes, all of which
have been inventoried and analyzed by their stock taker. His project on the Paris
Arcades, a collection of quotations and commentary, was intended to scout the
“prehistory of the 19th century” from elements of the everyday world, art, and
dreams. It registers types (the flâneur, the dandy, the rag picker, the whore),
building forms and places (arcades, boulevards, panoramas, catacombs),
materials (iron, glass), the effect of fashion, advertising and the workings of the
commodity. For all this Benjamin created “a place in the archives of our
memory” (Baudelaire1). This entire work of this author can be conceived as an
archive of thought, of perceptions, of history and of the arts.
What can be found in these archives? The opening chapter “Tree of
Conscientiousness”—a quotation from Benjamin, as are all of the chapter
headings in this book—traces Benjamin’s activity as an archivist of his own
writings. Lists, catalogues, and card indexes, at once meticulous and inventive
compilations, have all found their way into the archive. At the chapter’s center
stands a registry, in which Benjamin rubricated his correspondence and
manuscripts according to his own predilections. “Scrappy Paperwork” deals with
the word “scrap” (verzetteln); and its twofold meaning—as “failure,
fragmentary, unachieved,” on the one hand, and as a particular method of
making information manageable, on the other. Benjamin’s legacy consists of
hundreds of little scraps; and as such might be associated with Zettel’s Dream by
Arno Schmidt and the little boxes of memoranda in Jean Paul’s Quintus Fixlein
—in a review in 1934 Benjamin claimed that Jean Paul’s boxes of memoranda
were the archive of art of the Biedermeier period. Small-format manuscripts